Category: Toyota Kata

Today was Day 1 of KataCon in San Diego. Click here for my notes from yesterday, the pre-events.

Like yesterday, this is a mix of things I heard and things I thought of as a result of hearing them (or writing about them here). I’ll try to make a distinction between them, but no guarantees, I just write down what I think.

Be a coach. Have a coach. – Seek out someone to coach you, go find someone to coach.

Mike Rother:

A plan is really just a hypothesis. It is a prediction of what you currently believe will happen, based on the evidence you have. It isn’t, not can it be a definitive statement about how things will actually go. If you treat it as a hypothesis instead of a “this will happen” definitive statement, you will be in a much better position to respond smoothly to the inevitable disruptions and discontinuities.

A model alone is not enough. No matter how well you explain a concept, the challenge is (and always has been) how to actually transition it into reality. What I have seen in the past is struggle to develop the perfect model so “they will get it” when it is explained. “They” understand it. That isn’t the problem. The problem is it takes a lot of work, experimentation and discovery to figure out how to make things actually work like that.

The Improvement Kata:

• A practical scientific thinking pattern (the model) PLUS
• Daily routines for deliberate practice.

The model, by itself, only gives you the framework for what to practice, not how to practice it.

Mike showed a really interesting, quick little exercise.

“What is the next number in this sequence:

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, _____ ?

Of course most people will say “14.” But that is a hypothesis. A prediction. You actually have no information about what the next number is.

Let’s say the next number is 2.

What have we learned?

• It isn’t 14. The theory that the numbers are a series incrementing by two has been refuted by the evidence.
• We have a new theory, perhaps the pattern repeats.

How would we test it? What prediction would we make?

Note this is a much, much different response than “I was wrong.” Instead, evidence that does not fit the theory simply redirects the direction of investigation.

What if it was 14? What if we ran it 100 times and it was 14? Could we definitely say that on the next iteration it would be 14? No. All we can say is there is no evidence that the theory is false.

I’m just throwing this in because I remembered it when I was writing this. From xkcd.com by Randal Munroe:

The Difference between Scientists and The Rest Of Us

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Small experiments.

• Learn quickly.
• Limited “blast radius” –> Small controlled experiments are far less likely to have far reaching negative effects if things do not go as predicted.

You can’t say “This will happen” with this mindset.

My thought: Any statement about the future you make ALWAYS GETS TESTED, whether you do so deliberately or not. The future arrives. You have a choice. You can EITHER:

• Be wrong –OR–
• Learn

Which would you choose? Make the choice deliberately.

This feels awkward. That is how it is supposed to feel. If you don’t feel awkward with something new, you are not learning.

Karyn Ross:

Karyn is the co-author, along with Jeff Liker, of The Toyota Way to Service Excellence. I have a copy of the book and will be writing up a review for a later post.

People who provide service are motivated by saying “I can.” Customer facing people want to help the customer.

The creativity zone is between “I can’t” and “I can.” What targets must you set, what experiments must you run, to cross that gap between “I can’t” and “I can?” as a response to a customer (internal or external)?

Kata is a way to get from “I can’t” to “I can.” It is a model of human creativity.

Invention is the mother of necessity.

Who needed a smart phone before it was invented?

What is your organization’s purpose in serving others? This is a powerful question to ask top leadership.

Dan Vermeech and Chris Schmidt

Dan and Chris had a dynamic presentation about their journey to transition their company away from being an action item driven company  (that won the Shingo Medal for being so good at it!) toward being a learning organization.

Amy Mervak

Amy gave us an update on her journey introduced at a previous conference. She relayed how kata is helping build higher levels of performance AND higher levels of compassion and empathy in a hospice.

Empathy

• Cognitive – intellectual understanding of what another person is likely feeling.
• Emotional – a state of co-feeling with another person.
• Compassionate – response to another person’s feelings.

Her final question was “How does practicing the kata help you and your organization connect?

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Prior to the break:

The gap between knowing and doing is far bigger than anybody thinks it is.

Joe Ross

(Joe Ross is the CEO of Meritus Health in Hagerstown, Maryland. They have been a client, and I nominated Joe to be a keynote at the conference.)

“It took me a while to be as happy about a failure as a success.” … “GREAT! We can try again tomorrow!”

Joe was connecting with the principle of predictive failure that Mike had described in the “it isn’t 14, it’s 2” exercise.

“Innovators appear in the strangest places and some superstars are lousy at daily improvement.”

Joe related some cases where the “hero culture” leaders were having a hard time adapting to no longer just “having the answers,” where some quiet more behind-the-scenes leaders are the ones with the breakthroughs.

“We learned that Kata isn’t just a problem solving tool – it’s a leadership development program.”

Jeremiah Davis

Jeremiah has the “Kata at Home” YouTube channel. I highly suggest you check it out. There is a compelling story about kids, family and parenting developing there.

A child’s mind is designed to learn. An adult’s mind is designed to perform.

My thoughts: We, in the continuous improvement community, have been telling people for decades that they must “think like a child” to have fresh ideas.

Jeremiah nails what is different about kids with this quote which I am already incorporating into my own material (with attribution of course). This is the difference. It reflects what a child’s brain, and an adult’s brain, are each optimized to do. It doesn’t mean, of course, that adults can’t learn. Nor does it mean kids can’t perform. But in neither case is it optimal.

What kids are learning, as they grow up, is how to perform. They are learning, through experimentation, which automatic patterns work well to get through everyday life.

If adults are willing to practice they can learn to learn the way kids learn naturally. This is what the Improvement Kata provides – a way to practice.

At the same time, Jeremiah is working very hard as a parent to teach his kids how to learn deliberately so, as their minds mature, their performance optimization – the habits his kids have learned to get through everyday life – is learning. How cool is that?

Adults have “Functional Fixedness” – we (adults) see things as they are. Kids don’t have that constraint.

They see things for what they could be, they see things with features that are only in their imagination, but those features are as real to them as the physical attributes.

And any parent will know this one (or will very much sooner than they expect):

“Puberty is when parents become difficult to deal with.”

Skip Stewart

Skip is the Chief Improvement Officer of Baptist Memorial Health Care, a large multi-hospital and clinic system in the Southeastern USA. He talked about his efforts to integrate various initiatives: Kata, TWI, A3, Hoshin, and more into a single system as well as his impressive scaling of the transition across a multi-state, multi-site 15,000 person organization.

Skip made a great distinction between coaching and scientific coaching. The term “coaching” is a major buzz word these days – I suspect at least some of this is the “Lean Bazaar” tracking in behind the Toyota Kata momentum.

A system cannot be separated into individual parts. Only the interactions between the pieces produce the system behavior.

An automobile consists of an engine, transmission, drive train, wheels, axles, steering system, brakes, body, seats, etc, etc. It’s purpose is to carry you from place to place. None of its constituent sub-systems will do that by themselves. You only have an “automobile” when all of the parts interact correctly.

Skip was quoting Russell Ackoff (Who I had the opportunity to listen to and meet a long while ago), perhaps one of the greatest systems thinkers ever. Skip’s point is that we have all of these different techniques and tools, but none of them, alone, is going to do everything. Furthermore, deploying them separately – without regard for integration – may well make things worse.

Q&A Session

Some notes I took during the Q&A session with the presenters:

Actions to take = hypotheses. They must be tested, not implemented.

Leader standard work is the responsibility of the leader above.

Don’t sweat the obstacle list. If you left something off the list, don’t worry. Obstacles will find you if you don’t find them. – Mike Rother

My follow-on to the above: The original question was asked by someone relating that, as a coach, he could see obstacles that his learner was missing. Mike’s response was right on – if the coach is keeping the learner on track in the improvement corridor, then the obstacles that must be found will, indeed, turn up.

My addendum would be that often times the learner’s path to the target bypasses the obstacles you thought were critical. The learner finds another way. As a coach, you must be open to the possibility that your learner will surprise you with creativity.

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There was additional Q&A / discussion time after the day’s events as we ran out of time.

There was additional discussion about the value of the “Model Line” (See yesterday’s post where I discussed a couple of failure mode alternatives to the intended “let them see the power of this” outcome.)

Constancy of purpose is critical. What is your intent? Why are you doing it?

If you are implementing a model line as a learning laboratory for leaders (this is VERY different from a “demonstration”) then that is much more likely to work than if you are implementing a model line to “demonstrate the power of the lean tools.”

Breakout Session: TK in Software Development

These are more my notes upon reflection than things that were covered in the workshop directly.

There were a number of breakout sessions to choose from. I decided to attend the one with the topic I knew the least about.

The workshop itself was engineered to teach the Improvement Kata pattern to software developers rather than teach software development management to Kata Geeks. Still I got a lot out of the discussions about the overlaps.

To anyone casually aware of cutting edge software development today, it is obvious that “Agile” (with scrums, sprints, etc), “Lean Startup,”  and related software (and product*) development management techniques are built around the same underlying thinking pattern that Toyota Kata is intended to teach.

At the same time, it is equally obvious that software development suffers from exactly the same “copy the tools and you will be as good as the best” mentality that the “lean” community does.

It is an interesting topic that I want to learn more about. I’ll be attending the Kata in Software Development panel discussion tomorrow.

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*The first use of the Rugby “scrum” analogy I have found in literature was in a 1982 HBR article about product engineering development at Honda. I found that quite interesting when the engineering development people were pushing back about using software development management to try to manage engineering design. Um… the software guys got the foundation from engineering, not the other way around.

KataCon officially starts tomorrow as I write this but today was a couple of pre-events and I learned a few things worth sharing. These are from my notes.

Common failure modes for continuous improvement / kata:

Note that these titles and words are not necessarily what I heard in the presentation. They are my notes and interpretations, along with my own similar experiences.

Resistance from a support organization.

The presenter talked about a case where a manager was having great success applying the Toyota Kata thinking pattern, and improving quality in the process. However the corporate quality department didn’t see the records, paperwork, etc. in the format they expected and caused a lot of problems.

I have actually seen this myself in the case of a factory in a multi-plant company. A plant manager figured out good flow pretty much on his own and got there without kaizen events, and without the direct participation from the corporate “lean promotion office.” Very senior people from the LPO engaged in a subtle (and not subtle) campaign to discredit the success. Ultimately the plant manager ended up leaving the company for elsewhere.

In another case I counseled a local C.I. manager in a larger company to “make what you are doing look like what the corporate C.I. office expects to see.” By renaming some forms and using their jargon to describe what he was doing (even though it was a little different), he was able to protect his approach.

SHOULD anyone have to do this? NO!!! But sometimes it is necessary.

Key Point: Understand the political environment and develop countermeasures just like you would for any other obstacle. It doesn’t help to get made about it. Just deal with it.

Consultant as Surrogate Leader

In this “Fail” the external consultant was chartered to provide coaching to a couple of junior-level managers by the owner of the company who did not participate. Needless to say this can result in political problems as well, especially for the managers being trained when they start doing things differently than what the owner is used to seeing. (What did he think was going to happen?) Again: If you are a practitioner / consultant (internal OR external) be aware of this kind of situation.

Spotlight Showed Problems

The improvement effort begins with a deep look at the current condition. This inevitably makes issues visible that were previously hidden. Again, if the culture / politics of the organization are not friendly to revealing problems, the ground work needs to be laid first.

The Guru Model

The “Guru Model” is pretty common – actually relates to everything above, especially the first topic. If you are working on developing these skills in the line leadership, it can dilute the status of the experts – who may or may not be as truly competent as they claim. We are seeing a shift away from a model of doing what the expert tells us to, and toward a model of learning to figure it out ourselves. The second model is far more flexible and works in almost any situation. We need to let go of the idea of seeking “the answers” from Gurus, and embrace that we need to learn how to figure them out.

“Doing Lean” with a challenge of “Getting Lean”

Don’t be a solution in search of a problem. The traditional approach has been to have “lean program” that pushes deploying tools and models that resemble a snapshot of a benchmark company such as Toyota. That implementation becomes an end unto itself. In the example discussed, the target company was doing fine in the eyes of its owner, but the consultant was trying to sell him on “lean” to “eliminate waste.” Even if there is a lot of possible upside, if the owner isn’t feeling the need to do something different, you are probably not going to get very far.

Note: If you are an internal practitioner, it is even harder. Ultimately it is managements job to set a performance challenge for the organization that can’t be met by tweaking the status-quo. “The challenge is often challenge” came up a number of times – organizations are typically pretty bad at establishing challenges that actually… challenge anything.

The Value of a “Model Line” as a “Demonstration of the Power”

This was an interesting discussion. Traditional thinking, for decades, has been that those who want to implement a change find a single area to transform in order to demonstrate what is possible. The idea is that once management sees the power, they will want to spread the same approach across the organization.

This effort could be taken on by an outside consultant, such as an MEP, or even an internal centralized improvement office (which may technically be “internal consultants” but they are “outside” to the other departments in the organization.

In either case, there is a lot of time and effort required, with no real assurance that even dramatic success will be seen in the light intended. My thoughts are there are at least two other equally plausible scenarios:

• The one I discussed earlier: The success is discounted as an special case that can’t be replicated. This is what happened in the company where the company lean office that was the primary detractor.
• Possibly worse: Management sees how great it is, and puts together a mass training / deployment plan to standardize the “new process” and rapidly spread it across the organization as a project – an approach that is doomed to fail.

Better, perhaps, to use a simple, short, mass-orientation exercise such as Kata in the Classroom to introduce the concept to as wide an audience as possible. Then see who is interested and help them learn more. You can’t force this stuff upon anyone. Ever.

Other Notes

Developing capability in the organization requires covering both technical and social (people relations, leadership) skills with leaders.

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Target conditions and experiments means “you don’t have to boil the ocean or solve world hunger.” My thoughts: I have seen executives reluctant to accept or commit to a challenge because they did not know ahead of time exactly what would be required to reach it. The point of breaking down the challenge into target conditions, and further into obstacles, and addressing obstacles one-by-one makes the challenge seems less overwhelming.

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The first group to get training needs to be the senior leaders. They learn by doing on the shop floor: Making actual improvements on actual processes. If the execs aren’t willing to learn, you probably aren’t going to get far. Further notes: This doesn’t mean you can’t do anything without full participation from the top. But you will reach a limit to what is possible.

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Kata Ideas vs. “Suggestions” or simply soliciting ideas for improvement. A traditional suggestion program solicits any idea that the team member things might help. When there is a supervisor-as-learner working against a specific obstacle, striving to achieve a specific target condition, the ideas are much more focused.

Supervisor to team: “I’m trying to figure out how to solve this problem. Does anybody have any ideas we can test?” Then test them one by one as experiments.

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“Real” scientists often don’t do true “single factor experiments.” They do mess around and try changing things up to see what happens. But if they see something interesting they then go back and run controlled experiments to isolate variables to understand what is happening.

This is totally different than the common approach of implementing a bunch of changes and hoping the problem goes away. If the problem does go away, and you don’t then rigorously investigate why, you have learned little or nothing. Now you are stuck in the position where you can’t risk changing anything at all because you don’t actually know what is important.

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Measuring the success of “Toyota Kata”

We emphasize that you don’t “implement Toyota Kata.” Instead, you use the Improvement Kata and the Coaching Kata as practice routines to embed a new way of thinking into the organization’s daily habit of the way things are done.

The key is the thinking pattern that remains and self sustains. In companies that are very advanced, you sometimes see few, if any, “Toyota Kata boards” because the thinking pattern is embedded in every conversation they have.

Just as we say “Lean is NOT about the tools” – it isn’t about the physical artifacts, neither is Toyota Kata.

However (my current thinking) (THIS IS CRITICAL) – the artifacts are what provides the initial structure that lets you get that thinking started, allows people to practice it, and lets you observe how they are doing. My thought: DO NOT TAKE THIS DOWN until you are confident that someone new just joining your organization is going to learn it simply by picking it up from the way people talk to them every day.

These are just raw notes and some thoughts about them. If any of this sparks interest, leave a comment and I can expand on it with a more formal post.